Start Over

A flight to Jakarta today ended everything. Finally the semester is over. It has been an exhausting semester, really. Academically last semester was tougher, but this semester is tougher in general. I had more commitment, and yes it has developed me somehow in organizing my time. I was messed up in the middle of semester because of all those commitments, but thankfully I went through well.

However, if you ask me if there is anything I learn more than other, yes there is. I learn to let everything go. I finally realize that my glorious days from the time I got gold in OSN has ended. Before OSN 2012, I had had enough of failures and I was already insensitive to that; but from OSN 2012 to IOAA 2013 (even can be extended to my first year in NTU) I didn’t have quite a loss. I won almost all competitions I joined, my CGPA was quite well, I was happy with how things were going and it was like life had stopped throwing bricks at me. I don’t realize if I have became resistive at failures.

That is why I came to Singapore with excitements end expectations this August, believing that great things are still coming. But those bricks were finally thrown to me one by one. Everything changed this semester. I ended a relationship which has been there for quite long. I lost my iPad which I used very much for studying. I also saw my high school friends getting busier so we could not have talks as much as before. I broke my laptop screen so that I will have to buy new one quite soon because repairing it will be very costly and not economically good for long-term use. And some other things. It was like each one of them was taken from me one by one, leaving a hole inside (no, does not mean I was in relationship with my ipad and laptop). I would have never expected these to happen, but shit does happen in our life.

If you never experience these bad things, you might be thinking, “Why does it happen? Why life suddenly becomes so evil to me?”. I thought the same thing – after being (quite) free of bad things in a while. In the midst of my school problems, their (things I mentioned in above paragraph) disappearances were just distracting. I know some happened because of my mistakes, but I never intended to do it. Now I had to start over every time I lost one of them, and doing the same thing without one of the biggest part is never easy, just like Liverpool without Suarez. And it is like life does not want me to enjoy my life so much.

A perfectionist like me may like to think how my life would have been had it not happened, and a lot of times my brain said had it not happened, things would have been better. Talking about short effect, it is true. I have not seen the better things have come as the replacement. But this time I was taught that suffering now maybe better than suffering a lot more in the future, which can possibly happen if I keep hanging on the past. I will not know what life has to offer if I survive, and I just have to believe that everything happens for a reason. In the future, I might look back and smile because it happened. Even for an irrelevant reason like “thankfully my iPad got lost, now I can buy an iPad Air 2”. Haha, just kidding.

At the end of the day, life keeps going at the same pace. It will not slow down so that you are not left behind, instead you must catch up. Keep hanging and not letting go will only resist you from moving forward, therefore now it is either you play the game, or you get played. So let’s ace it!